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10/03/2013

Oscar Predictions: Round 1 - Too Soon?

Diana: A good example for why one shouldn't call the Oscars too soon.

Remember when we thought that the Best Actress race of 2013
would boil down to a biopic smackdown between BFFs Naomi Watts and Nicole
Kidman? This example demonstrates how, as fun as it is to speculate, one shouldn’t
try to predict the Oscars a year in advance. Naomi and Nicole are out, since questions of quality have ejected Diana from
her seat and Grace of Monaco has been
pushed back until 2014 because, as Harvey Weinstein reports,
it simply won’t be ready. Thank goodness, since Best Actress is already crowded
and it’s only October. But tasteless Diana jokes prompt a necessary Oscar
question: Is it too soon?

The answer: no, it’s not too soon. Cases like Diana show that a film that sounds like
Oscar gold on paper might not turn out to be so precious when it hits
theatres, so one shouldn’t make Oscar picks in the weeks following the previous
year’s awards. Fall is the best time to start, since TIFF is a few weeks behind
us and other festivals have closed while others are underway, so most of the
major contenders for this year have shown up or will do so soon. It’s not too
soon to start guessing, especially for the 2013 Oscar race, since this year’s
competition is particularly festival-loaded. Very few of the viable/likely
contenders will remain to be seen after the New York Film Festival, and most of
the final films will show up at the AFI. Harvey Weinstein himself calls
this year’s Oscar race the “most competitive ever” and if the award’s biggest
mover and shaker is already sussing out the competition, so should we.

Peter Saarsgard and Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine.

The Early Contenders

People seem to be especially amnesiac with all the good
movies that have come out this year. Four solid contenders hit theatres
well before the fall festival circuit offered shiny new things, and there’s
really no reason to doubt them aside from the fact that they had an early release.
Take Before Midnight, for example, which
has a whopping score of 94 on Metacritic and has earned a respectable 8 million
dollars at the box office. Solid reviews and strong word of mouth has helped
this third installment in the Jesse and Celine franchise hit its peak, so there
isn’t much reason to doubt that voters won’t be warm to this chapter. The
previous installment, Before Sunset,
earned a well-deserved screenplay nomination for 2004, so one can assume that
the franchise has fans in the Academy.

Ditto Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, which, to me, remains the best dramatic film to hit theatres this
year. Jasmine has earned some
enthusiastic reviews (it sits at 78 on Metacritic) and has surpassed 30 million
dollars at the box office, making it the second highest grossing indie of the year. Cate Blanchett’s career-best performance
almost guarantees that voters will see the film in the months to come if they
haven’t already, since it’s bound to bring Blue
Jasmine back into the spotlight when critics start handing out prizes. There
almost seems to be no beating Blanchett, for even a die-hard Streep fan like
myself must call this The Year of the Cate. Blanchett’s turn could help the film
scoop up extra recognition it deserves.

Somewhat more vulnerable might be summer’s other indie
darling Fruitvale Station. Earning
most rave reviews (86 on Metacritic) and a strong box office take of 16
million, it could work its way in to favour with the indie crowd since it tells
such a compelling true-story and offers a voice and a subject that genuinely
deserves to be pushed into the spotlight. It might not be a film that holds up
well to high expectations, but it might also have enough early fans to secure
it some love from the Academy.

The most secure early Oscar contender is arguably Lee Daniels’ The Butler. It might be the
lesser film of the ones mentioned so far, but it has already crossed the 100
million dollar mark at the box office and is generally seen as this year’s The Help in terms of scoring a Best
Picture nomination thanks to its crowd-pleasing charm and to the strength of
its performances. Oprah Winfrey’s scene-stealing performance is one of the
early frontrunners—and one that I’m fully behind now that Meryl Streep is back
in the lead category. Oprah’s presence in the race means that The Butler can’t be underestimated in
the slightest: as a Weinstein Company release, this film has Oprah and Harvey
Weinstein working for it on the campaign trail, which seems like a daunting
task for anyone to overcome. Remember, Oprah was the one who got the ball
rolling for Crash.

TIFF winner 12 Years a Slave

The Festival Films

Much of the festival chatter was discussed in the TIFF
wrap-up, with 12 Years a Slave and Gravitybeing the obvious frontrunners.
My own screenings of Philomena, August: Osage County, and Labor Day leave some anticipation that
the films are being underestimated, especially Philomena. Very little of the media coverage from this year’s
festivals, especially Telluride and Toronto, offered much in terms of substantial
assessments of the films. More reviews read like gut-level reactions to a film’s
viability at the Oscars, and it seemed as if a film wasn’t worth talking about
if it wasn’t a shoo-in for Best Picture. (August
seemed to have been hit the hardest—and the most unfairly so.) One hopes that
the subsequent releases of the films offer more qualitative analysis.

Other festivals, like New York, have been booming with buzz
as well. Captain Phillips, which
opened NYFF, is earning raves,
especially for Tom Hanks’ performance. More chatting has been around for the Coen
Brothers’ Inside LlewynDavis, which looks to have sustained the hype it built at Cannes. More love has also been
found for Alexander Payne’s Nebraska,
which seems to play better with American audiences than it does with folks on
the Croisette and is getting an AFI tribute
for Cannes winner Bruce Dern.

I’m increasingly less convinced, however, that the big
Cannes sensation—and winner—will appear at the Oscars. Blue is the Warmest Colour was not selected by France to represent
the country due to its release date, which means it’s shut out of the category
in which it was most likely to be a contender. I haven’t seen the film yet, but
I don’t doubt that the quality of Blue
is as strong as people say it is. It just doesn’t seem likely, though, that a
three-hour French lesbian drama with an NC-17 rating will find love in major
categories. That seems narrow-minded, I’ll admit, but those factors don’t help
in such a competitive year. Neither does the fact that the film is becoming a PR nightmare with director Abdellatif Kechiche saying the film shouldn’t be
released and a heavy bit of tears coming from the film’s two lead actresses who talk
about working with Kechiche in a way that makes Lars Von Trier sound like Mr.
Rogers.

Still to Come

Few films really look promising for the titles yet to be
unveiled. The Hobbit: The Desolation of
Smaug can probably be counted out from everything aside from the technical
categories since the previous installment might have dulled the enthusiasm for
Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies. Omitted from these nominations as well is
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street
simply because speculation abounds that the film won’t make its release
date of November 15. Scorsese is apparently working like mad to cut it down below a three-hour running time. Little
word has surfaced on George Clooney’s upcoming The Monuments Men, too, although the film’s trailer hints an
enjoyable Christmas release that might be more of a commercial success than a
critical one. (It looks like a ‘Globes movie’.) Ditto Ridley Scott’s upcoming
and star-studded The Counselor, which
will probably make a bundle but might not collect any hardware.

More promising—for no reason other than intuition—are Saving Mr. Banks and American Hustle.Saving Mr. Banks looks exactly like the kind of enjoyable, safe, nostalgic
“Yay Hollywood!” romp that has won Best Picture for the past two seasons. Early
footage of this story about the Walt Disney adaptation of P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins hints at a fun, delightful,
and audience-friendly tale. The film also seems to boast a pair of juicy roles
for Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks as Travers and Disney. Faith might dwindle when
one learns that Saving Mr. Banks is
from the director of The Blind Side,
but let’s remember how much the Academy loved that one. (Although that’s an indiscretion
I’d much rather forget.) If Saving Mr.
Banks is nominated for Best Picture, it will be the first live action
Disney production to receive the honour since Mary Poppins did so in 1964. How fitting would that be?

American Hustle,
finally, must be on the radar since David O. Russell has been in the running
for his last two films, The Fighter and
Silver Linings Playbook. The star
talent alone makes the film one to watch. Hustle
could shift the Oscar race considerably when people finally see it: this year
is jam-packed with contenders in the acting categories, but Russell’s last two
filmsgarnered seven acting
nominations between them. His style offers films that rely heaving on the strength
of the performances, and with a cast that includes Christian Bale, Amy Adams,
Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner, and Robert De Niro, it seems
loony to think that someone won’t
find their way onto the final ballot. But who will???

Let’s get the first round of predictions going. It’s never
too soon to talk Oscars!

Other submissions reviewed:Child’s Pose(Romania), The Grandmaster (Hong Kong, note: the original version of the film was
submitted, not the Weinstein recut that screened in North American), Renoir (France)